


The Insectivore

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Marvel (Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemon, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 11:10:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/584754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years before Jane hit a space alien with the Mystery Machine in the middle of the New Mexico desert, Darcy took a class on how to profile people's daemons. [daemon fusion.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Insectivore

**Author's Note:**

> For Ammay, who prompted me with "Avengers, daemon!AU, bonus points for Sif/Loki," and let's face it, daemon fic is never a thing I'm not going to want to write. Thanks to grey_bard for fixing my mythology.
> 
> Warnings for appearances by several types of reptiles, including lizards and snakes. Also insects. Mentions of captivity. Otherwise, this should be okay.
> 
> You can read here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/116267.html).

☄

The population of Puente Antigua is 2,091. When her older brother drives her down and drops her off at the start of the summer, she’s expecting him to make a joke about how they added that “1” just as she drove up. Because he’s super predictable -- seriously, the boy is like her period -- he obliges her, his grackle daemon laughing raucously from her perch on the dashboard. Darcy sighs, socks his shoulder, and makes him carry all her books.

But really, they probably added that “1” when a man fell out of the sky and Jane hit him with their Camper Trailer of Science, because she’s an awesome person like that.

Up until all the Science happened (and by Science she means the Invasion of the Extremely Intense LARP Enthusiasts from Outer Space,) Darcy was having a really good summer.

Like, sure, Puente Antigua is ridiculously tiny and has far too many churches than the population could possibly require, but it meant Darcy didn’t have to pick up a summer shift at Blockbuster, where the customers never said thank you and her manager’s mastiff daemon drooled great globs of saliva all over all the return slips: instead, she got to drive Jane around and microwave burritos at vague approximations of mealtimes and remind Vitch that he needed to groom his fur or else he was going to start looking like one of those little munchkin aliens from Star Wars -- Ewoks, yes, thank you. Also, she’d never have to worry about another natural science requirement as long as she _lived._ And she got a lot of knitting done! She’s finished more baby booties and fabulously flamboyant knit caps in the two months she’s been on internship than she did in three whole semesters of PoliSci.

“No, really,” she’s telling Dwornin, while behind her Jane mutters unhappily and flips through pages of print-outs on Science, numerous pages annotated in the margins and smeared with burrito guts.

(And yes, she knows what Jane and Vitch do is thermonuclear astrophysics with a concentration on atmospheric aberrations, but come on, try saying that five times fast or before you’ve had a cup of coffee and then come tell Darcy her word isn’t more efficient.)

“Take them off,” Dwornin implores her, toneless.

“I shan’t,” Darcy replies loftily. “It’s a good look on you.”

Twitchily, Dwornin tilts his head, peering up at her with one beady eye. He looks coolly unimpressed, but that’s his default expression, so she doesn’t take it to heart. She rearranges one of the little knit wings so that it folds up neatly along his dorsal ridge. He sighs.

Behind her, Jane says, “I don’t get it! All previous phenomenon has been predictable down to the second.”

“Can I turn on the radio?” Darcy wants to know. She’d left her iPod back at the lab, and man, she’s really feeling some Ciara right now. She wriggles back and forth in the driver’s seat, bopping her head and thinking, _automatic supersonic hypnotic funky fresh BAM._

“No,” Jane retorts, flopping into the passenger seat and passing her notes to Vitch, who paws through them for something she might have missed. “I’m sorry, Erik. I wouldn’t have asked you to fly out here if I hadn’t been so _sure.”_

“Don’t ever apologize to me for innovation, Jane,” Erik responds, because Erik is a cool guy like that. “Your research is like nothing I’ve ever seen. I would have come for a lot less.”

“Still,” Jane says, eyes darting to the Tupperware tub they’ve got stashed firmly behind Darcy’s seat, filled half-full with water, where Erik’s daemon is just visible in the dark interior of the camper, her eyes lidded under the surface and watchful. Turtle daemons aren’t really made for the New Mexico desert, and the strain’s even showing on Erik, who pulls at his collar and scratches uncomfortably.

Darcy sighs, crossing her arms over the steering wheel and scanning the night sky; this is another reason why she’s glad she applied for this internship, even if it had nothing to do with her major, because there’s no way they get this kind of star-gazing sky in Albuquerque, not unless you wanted to drive out into the suburbs where all the Republicans live.

“Can you take them off?” Dwornin asks again.

“Why? You’re a bearded dragon,” Darcy informs him, feeling the familiar thrill of _knowing._ It still hasn’t worn off, that comfortable assurance that comes with having a settled daemon, like everything feels _right,_ the way it does on mornings when she has a fantastic breakfast or when she’s just finished a life-altering book or when she has nothing more urgent to do than go through a whole archive on Cracked: it’s that kind of right, whenever she needs to feel it. He’ll look like that the rest of their lives. “I knitted you little wings so that you could be a real dragon!”

“They’re purple,” Dwornin observes.

“It brings out the color in your eyes,” Darcy deadpans.

And then, because she’s least expecting it, the sky explodes.

☄

Because Jane’s IQ is frankly ludicrous and she makes the best life decisions when using it, she totally runs over this guy in the middle of the Dust Storm of Death and they’re probably going to get arrested and then Darcy has to decide which would be better: sudden death by humiliation (or freak storm cloud, she hasn’t ruled that one out yet) or having to call her mom from jail. Again.

The guy staggers to his feet, and Jane starts yelling about the imprint stamped into the ground, but Darcy only has eyes for how _big_ that random stranger is. He looks like somebody who spends too much time at the gym to compensate for his personal failings and chews tobacco and can probably spit further than an Olympic shotput, and Darcy’s brain does the equivalent of a great big NOPE and shuts right the fuck off with fear, because what are two short women and one old man tethered by an out-of-element daemon supposed to do against Mr. Steroids Breakfast of Champions?

“Darcy!” Jane bellows. “Get the light, I need to --”

And the guy bellows even louder, drowning her out and staggering around, and Vitch bounds out of the way when he comes way, way, _way_ too close. He draws himself up to his full height to make himself look bigger, which always made Darcy feel like she was talking to a small person, but doesn’t even clear this guy’s belt.

Breakfast of Champions sways towards him again, angrily demanding, “Where am I? What realm is this? What have you done to me?”

Vitch’s ears flatten, kicking out of the way again with his powerful back legs and coming close enough that even Jane notices, going stiff at the violation of her daemon’s personal space.

Darcy goes for her taser and snaps, “Hey, Toto, you aren’t in Kansas anymore, calm down!”

Unfortunately, this just draws his ire on her. He advances, blustering, and in the background, she hears Vitch’s angry chittering and Erik’s ineffectual, “We should get him to a hospital before --”

“You dare?” goes Big and Scary, face distorted. Dwornin hisses up at him, bearded frill extended. “To threaten --”

She fires the taser. The nodes connect; the smell of burning hair is acrid.

He drops. Stays there.

Twitches.

Jane and Erik turn to look at her.

“ _What?”_ Darcy goes shrilly. “He was freaking me out! Didn’t you look at him? Where’s his daemon?”

They look down at the unconscious body on the ground. His clothes are fitted, athletic in their shape, almost, and leave very little to the imagination. Darcy’s brother used to tell her stories about men who, to keep their daemons from harm if their daemons were small enough, used to seal them in a pill capsule and shove them up their --

Yeah, no. Darcy isn’t comfortable with the idea of this guy conscious.

“Vitch? Dwornin?” Jane goes. “Can you sense his daemon?”

Darcy crouches, scooping Dwornin out of the dirt so she can tuck him underneath her chin, cuddling into his knobby, dry skin and the fabric of his little wings. He nudges along her jaw, reassuring, and says, "I can't. She’s ... I can’t. There’s nothing _there,"_ in a strained voice.

She looks over, sees the same answer in the flat set of Jane’s mouth. Jane frowns down, not at the strange hieroglyph embedded into the dirt, which is the only remaining evidence of the Dust Storm of Death that brought them out here, but at the man sprawled on top of it, small convulsions jerking through his muscles. “We need to get him to a hospital,” Erik interjects gravely from the sidelines.

They look down again.

“Okay,” says Darcy after a pause. “So who’s going to lift him into the camper?”

☄

Jane hits Mr. Steroids Breakfast of Champions -- Thor, for short -- with the Jeep a few more times, and then they wind up with him sitting at their breakfast table, downing two Poptarts in, like, four bites. And those are, like, the super fudge-chocolate ones with the chocolate star sprinkles that Darcy uses to roundhouse-kick her cramps into submission. Dude isn’t even chewing -- how can he appreciate them if he isn’t even chewing?

_Rude._

Thor’s brow creases. “What are these beasts?” he demands, and at the “b” in beasts, crumbs go everywhere.

“Dude, say, don’t spray,” Darcy says mildly.

Jane frowns, distracted from her back-and-forth. “What do you mean?”

“They are everywhere in this realm. I have not witnessed a single body without one. You treat them not as pets,” Thor continues, still in that haughty, belligerent tone that is totally giving Darcy Renaissance Faire vibes, like at any moment, he’s going to stand up and invite them all to witness the jousting session at three of the afternoon, would the ladies grant their favors? He gestures first at Vitch, tapping intently through Jane’s laptop with his fur poofed in every direction, eyes bugging with no sleep, and then at Dwornin, sunning himself unconcernedly by the window. Erik’s turtle daemon crosses the linoleum, stepping slowly and carefully, neck craned up so she can keep her eye on Thor. “And yet they do not speak.”

“Not to you, of course not,” Jane retorts, looking flustered. “They’re our daemons, they talk to nobody but us.”

The burrow between Thor’s brow deepens, like he genuinely doesn’t understand.

“Don’t you have one?” she presses on, eyes darting to Darcy and Erik for assistance. Darcy shrugs back at her; she has no idea how to tell a grown man what daemons are. It’s one of the first things you’re ever conscious of; that togetherness, that awareness. There’s no _need_ to explain it.

He swallows his bite, considering the question. “No.”

Erik’s hands go white-knuckle on the handle of his coffee mug. Darcy’s fingers hiccup, and she dies spectacularly in the game of Snake she’s playing on her iPhone. She feels the intense urge to get up and leave the room, to look away, like Thor is something naked, shameful; a cadaver, unsettlingly bare, unsettlingly alone. Darcy knows there are men without daemons -- she had to volunteer at the VA for community service in high school once, but Thor doesn’t have the look of a veteran or a corpse. His gaze is intense, engaged, flicking to each of their faces with precision, gauging their reactions. He’s _alive,_ in the way that the soulless usually aren’t. 

On the windowsill, Dwornin picks up on Darcy’s rising heartbeat and hisses, frill extending.

Voice strangled, Erik finally says, “You don’t have a _soul?”_

Thor fires up immediately. “What an impertinent question! Of course I still --”

The penny drops.

The anger’s gone before they even have time to tense up, worried he’ll go berserk like he did in the hospital, and it’s replaced by an almost childlike wonder. “They are your souls?” he goes. “The mortals of this realm carry their souls outside their bodies? How was I not aware of this fact?”

Darcy catches Jane’s eye and lifts her eyebrows deliberately, like, _for real, who decided it was okay to let science fiction walk into our lives?_

Jane looks unrepentant.

Thor slams his hand on the table, vaulting to his feet so quickly that everybody jumps; coffee goes sloshing all over Erik’s hand. Jesus, just when Darcy thinks she can’t forget how _big_ this guy is, he goes and does something like _loom_ over them like a _creepy looming thug with the abs of an intensely homoerotic Greek statue._ Erik’s daemon retracts her head towards her shell, uncertain.

“Ahh, now I see the trick of it!” bursts out of Thor, enthused. "They are the very nature of your person! You --"

"Darcy," Darcy says helpfully, when his pointing finger lands on her.

It swings towards Dwornin, who cocks his head in consideration and watches him beadily. "Your soul is that of a calm, unaffected creature, who reacts defensively when provoked."

"Yeah, hey, sorry I tased you."

"And you, man of science --"

"I’m Dr. Selvig, thank you," Erik interjects, looking suspicious.

"-- sorcerers and scholars frequently employ reptiles as their companions of choice. I saw it in the hospital before I escaped -- the serpent twined around the magician’s staff? The serpent is the patron of medicine in this realm, is it not?"

Nonplussed, Erik says, "She’s a spotted turtle."

Thor shrugs; the minutiae is lost on him. He flashes his teeth at Jane, still caught up in the exuberance of his discovery. "And the lady of the house; your soul is bright-eyed, inquisitive, a creature of curiosity!"

Vitch licks his muzzle, disconcerted.

"That’s --" Jane fumbles, looking from him to Thor and back. "Um, that’s probably the nicest way we’ve ever heard it put. Most people look at him and see how fluffy he gets when he hasn’t groomed and don’t bother, um -- he’s a -- a babokoto."

"A babokoto," Thor echoes, like he’s never heard a more foreign word and is completely delighted by it.

Jane -- and Darcy will continue to cast aspersions on how frequently that woman uses her IQ, no matter how frighteningly high it may be -- looks completely charmed. "Also known as the indri lemur," she adds quickly, her cheeks warm. "He helps me with my research."

Slowly, Vitch turns his enormous eyes on her with an unmistakably dry lilt to his lip. Jane’s jaw snaps shut audibly, and she busies herself shuffling papers around.

The exchange is not lost on Thor, who continues to look fascinated. Whatever, weird and daemonless is better than freaked out and dangerous and ranting about Bifrosts and hammers, so Darcy’ll take it. "Does he speak only to you?"

Jane nods. "Well, yes," and the look she gives Thor then is so familiar that Darcy almost groans: she looks at Thor like he’s Science. "He’s me and I’m him, so when we speak, our words are only for each other. It’s --" she waves the pen in her hand around, like she’s trying to sketch her meaning in broad strokes, like she’s never had to explain this to anyone. And she hasn’t, Darcy supposes: everyone already _knows._ "It’s like having a best friend around. _Always._ It’s -- you’re never alone."

He nods, absorbing that. Then, apropos of nothing, he slaps his thigh and bellows, "Fantastic! I still require sustenance!" And strides off.

Jane scrambles after him, leaving Darcy and Erik no choice but to leap to their feet and follow, Erik stooping to scoop his daemon up and tuck her into his elbow like a football. She retracts her head close to her shell, looking perturbed.

"More?" Darcy grumbles, pausing to let Dwornin dig his claws into her shoelaces and clamber up her leg until she can hook her fingers under his warm belly and deposit him on her shoulder. "He just ate my entire emergency stash of PopTarts and he wants more?"

☄

In the diner, people look at Thor sidelong, trying not to get caught at it. It’s unsettling, the sight of that much man and no daemon to accompany him. It’s interesting, how Darcy can practically _see_ their eye flick to pockets and the upturns of his jeans, looking for places a daemon might hide, just to reassure themselves.

Darcy’s aunt clears 5’3" only if she stretches her neck, but she’s got a giraffe daemon who used to surprise Darcy every morning when they visited by picking flowers and depositing them through the window of the second-story guest room where she slept, blinking his big brown eyes guilelessly when she yelped, surprised, sending Dwornin flicking from shape to shape on the pillow next to her. 

Her aunt was an anomaly, though. As the world shrinks, people’s daemons get smaller and smaller to compensate, so there’s absolutely nothing to the idea that big people must have big daemons, but it just _seems_ like they should.

The waitress, studiously avoiding looking at Thor the way you don’t look at somebody’s amputated limb, clucks her tongue as she tops up Erik’s water glass.

"Do you want me to fetch a tub for her?" he nods at his daemon. "My Lonnkirk has the same problem," she nods again, this time in the direction of her fire-bellied salamander, sitting in a terrarium on the counter by the cash register, condensation gathering on the glass. "It’s so _dry_ in these parts: wish I’d known that before I moved here."

"That would be much appreciated, thank you," Erik says gratefully, glad for the distraction from the futility of Jane trying to interrogate Thor on what it was like inside the event. In between massive bites of his food -- seriously, does his jaw unhinge like a snake’s? -- Thor keeps using those nonsense words, calm and with complete faith in their accuracy.

Although Darcy can give you a complete run-down of the first two games of Assassin’s Creed, including the Easter eggs, and that’s no mean feat, thank you very much, she’s no use to this discussion.

She shares her basket of fries with Dwornin, scrolling through Facebook updates for lack of anything better to do.

"Kieran Kincade is posting Linkin Park song lyrics in a passive-aggressive attempt to get people to pay attention to him," she informs him with all the solemnity this occasion requires. "They should really just make a button for that: "I need attention" or something. Oh, hey, Jin Ma’s brother’s daemon settled! Look, here’s the picture -- oh, hey, into a vole. That’s ... well. Good luck to that kid."

When Darcy was a sophomore, not yet disillusioned with the efficiency of the PoliSci department at UNM, she took an upper-division PoliSci course because it cross-sectioned with a Psychology requirement she had to take. It was called Strategies of Presentation in Executive Office and basically taught them how to profile a person judged on the looks of their daemon alone. _Go ahead and judge that book by its cover,_ Darcy wrote on her first page of notes, right under the course heading, and underlined it twice. It’s helpful when electing a political representative, knowing what kind of person they are, and the one thing they can’t cover up with smear campaigns and fake pandering to "current issues" is, of course, their daemon. Jin Ma’s brother may have the most engaging smile Darcy’s ever seen grace the opposite sex, but voles are solitary creatures who dwell in the dark underground. You can extrapolate a lot about the person based on that simple fact.

Cold-blooded, warm-blooded, big or small ... everything about a daemon corresponds to the human who belongs to it.

People are open books, long before you even look them in the eye.

☄

They sprint back to the lab. Every trace of the previous night’s coolness has completely worn off; the sunlight is so bright it’s almost like glass, like if she struck the air in the right place, it would rend apart into bright, crystalline summer shards. The dry heat has always been Darcy’s favorite part of living in New Mexico: it’s wonderful to be able to sprawl out on the roof to sun herself like a lizard and not have to worry about sweating her skin off, because there’s little to no humidity.

Jane and Erik aren’t on the same page: Vitch looks distinctly wilted in all his fur, sweat stains are plainly visible under Jane’s arms, and Erik’s surreptitiously pulling at his collar again.

Jane bursts into the lab yelling.

The whole place is crawling with Feds in suits. That’s when Darcy gets frightened, because who can afford to keep their heavy-lifting minions outfitted in black-tie finery and discipline them enough that they’re _still_ wearing that finery in the middle of the New Mexico desert?

Erik’s clearly reaches the same conclusion, because he snatches Jane by the back of her jacket, pulling her back and saying in an undertone, "Don’t! This is SHIELD! Don’t cross these guys, Jane, Dr. Banner did and no one’s heard from him since!"

She registers this news and pauses for the space of a heartbeat; Dr. Banner plainly means more to her than it does to Darcy. She looks down at Erik’s daemon, still in the cradle of his elbow; her mouth is working, open and close, and her legs are motoring at midair, like she desperately wants to start sprinting.

"That doesn’t meant they can just come in here and take our stuff!" Jane yells, getting her wind back. "This is _years_ of research! This is everything I own! This is -- this is _unconstitutional!"_ she flings at the Fed hovering nearby, breaking free of Erik’s grasp. To the left, Vitch tries to yank a laptop out from underneath a pile of things waiting to be crated -- _her_ laptop, Darcy realizes with a jolt, and the offense rankles so much her vision goes red in the corners: there isn’t even any Science on there! All there is is three semesters of college homework and some truly embarrassing edits of selfies from when she was going through a Photoshop phase. What could they possible want with it? -- only to be snarled down by four different daemons at once. Almost every single one of the crew has a canine daemon; she spots German Shepherds and greyhounds, one burly chow with its purple tongue lolling out, several wolves and a couple dingoes, and curses the loyalty of canine pack mentality.

"The Third Amendment prohibits the quartering of soldiers in private residence!" Jane shrieks, incensed, and Darcy’s startled enough by that to blink at her. Darcy’s party trick is being able to recite all the Amendments in the correct order, start to finish, but she didn’t realize Jane had actually been _listening._ "You cannot come into my home uninvited, you cannot _take_ my stuff! You, a part of the government! It’s _hypocritical!"_

"We’re sorry, Dr. Foster," the Fed answers, unruffled. He also doesn’t sound sorry. "A situation has arisen, and we need to approbate your research. Our apologies for the inconvenience, but know that we operate in the defense of our country."

It’s so inadequate an excuse that Jane can’t even find anything to say. Vitch vocalizes with a piercingly loud howl, pushing off with his hind legs and clearing the heads of the thugs to land inside one of the trucks parked out front. He grabs at any bit of research he can get his paws on, desperate and furious, and almost gets away with a thin manilla folder when something very large and with a lot of fur neatly backhands him with one mitt-sized paw and sends him flying.

Jane screams. Darcy and Dwornin scream. Erik advances, yelling, and steadies Jane when her knees almost buckle.

They right her, and she practically flies to where Vitch landed. He immediately hooks his arms around her neck, his legs around her waist, and lets her hold him close in a way Darcy has never seen from her before. She’s gotten so used to thinking of Vitch as Jane’s research partner that she forgets, sometimes, that he’s her daemon, too.

She covers Dwornin with one hand, protective. The look Erik gives the Fed is particularly hateful.

"Like we said, Dr. Foster," Agent Coulson continues mildly, his giant anteater daemon lumbering up to his side, a wall of muscle and fur. She has small, blind eyes and a nose that’s constantly twitching, her tongue flicking out at the air like she’s looking for small, significant details she can scoop back into her mouth like ants. She also has paws the size of batting gloves, claws curving in wicked sharp. "We require your research."

Then they’re gone, packed into the trucks, leaving nothing behind but Jane, stunned and trembling with rage, Darcy and Dwornin, Erik, the microwave, and a small tub of water for Erik’s daemon.

☄

**(interlude)**

The rain comes down shockingly fast, seemingly from nowhere, cold and striking sharp as needles. Still on her stomach on the ridge, Jane hastily pulls her jacket up over her and Vitch’s heads, and can do nothing for the way her legs start to sink into the mud.

"What’s going on?" Vitch murmurs, pressing into her side urgently. "Is he going to make it?"

Jane tears her eyes away from the sky, scanning the hastily-erected pavilion for the familiar enormous shape of Thor. Vitch’s eyes are closed, because they’re specially designed to catch light and practically glow in the dark; it’s useful when they’re out in the desert mapping abnormalities in the constellations, but it’ll be a dead give-away to anyone scanning the perimeter. He can see through Jane’s eyes, if Jane will just turn off the part of her brain attracted to atmospheric aberrations and please _focus_ on the potential space alien who fell through the wormhole they’ve been trying to prove the existence of and may or may not keep his daemon inside his body, which isn’t going to be something they’ll think about too long because that’s just disturbing.

"Sorry," Jane mutters back, and Vitch rumbles deep in his chest.

Thor’s easy to find: he’s the point all the SHIELD troops are converging on. The compound is littered with unconscious bodies, their daemons flung out beside them in the mud. Silhouetted through the tarp, Jane watches Thor roundhouse kick a woman under the chin, neatly felling her and her stag daemon.

He stops long enough to turn her over so she won’t drown in the mud before sprinting onwards, meeting two more soldiers and their wolf daemons around the corner.

"What’s the significance of the hammer?" she asks in an undertone, eyes dragged inexorably towards the clouds. It’s hard to tell, since the rain’s coming down so heavy, but she swears she can see a distinct spiral to the clouds above, with the center of the compound at their vortex. There’s only one thing at the center of the compound.

An irritated noise from the back of Vitch’s throat brings her attention back down to the scene in front of them. "Mjolnir," he provides helpfully, having absolutely no problem with all those consonants. And, "... maybe it’s his daemon?"

Jane giggles helplessly at that mental image.

All obstacles cleared, she watches from her vantage point as Thor approaches the hammer embedded in the rock, a swagger in his stride and a look of serenity in his face that needs no translating. He wraps his hand around Mjolnir’s handle and pulls.

Mjonir resists.

Expression wiped clear from his face, Thor pulls again. Uses both hands, braces his feet, and _hauls_ with all of his weight.

Nothing happens.

She sees the moment realization dawns on him: sees the gaping, wrenched shape of his mouth, the horror, followed immediately by the nameless terror of everyone who’s ever been in a dead-end situation with no idea what to _do._ For a moment, there’s no sound except for that of the rain coming down; the breathless gasp as it hits the earth.

When Thor throws his head back and howls, it strikes a blow to Jane’s chest as assuredly as if he really had swung the hammer. In it, she hears desolation, fright, the horrible, brought-low feeling of being rejected; it echoes inside of her, in all the empty, angry places she covered up when she got letters from the physics departments at Stanford, Chicago, when UNM sent her the applications for internships and Darcy’s was the only one, when she left the diner and watched SHIELD pack up her life’s work as easily as if they were picking up a new dishwasher from Sears. She knows that sound: it’s the sound of someone confronting, for the first time in their lives, that they’re just not good enough to do what they thought they could.

Whining low in his throat, Vitch presses as close as he can get. She buries her fingers into his fur and he licks at her ear reassuringly.

The remaining SHIELD soldiers close in. Thor doesn’t resist as they pull his arms behind his back; his head’s bent, hangdog, rain dripping from his hair, his shirt translucent in the places it isn’t caked black with mud.

They pull him to his feet, and --

\-- there, in the mud in the shadow of Mjolnir, is a creature, snout tucked into tail and chest rising slowly.

☄

Because she hadn’t heard anything to contrary, Darcy shows up for work at 8 the next morning, make-up lazily applied and a carry-container with three steaming hot coffees from Puente Antigua’s only gas station in one hand.

The lab is eerie, empty, with even the dry erase boards missing and the fridge unplugged. Raised voices are coming from the back, so she locks the door behind her and circles the building.

Jane and Erik are arguing fiercely outside the Camper Trailer of Science (not to be confused with the camper she lives in, that's another bag of worms Darcy isn't touching.) Jane’s obviously fresh out of the shower; her hair’s wet, gathered in an uncombed tangle and clipped to the crown of her head, and Vitch looks about two times smaller with his fur plastered down to his body. Dwornin tells her in an undertone that he can smell the clothes in Jane’s hamper: they smell like desert mud, rainfall, the stink of prey fear, and Darcy doesn’t need to be told what Jane did with her evening. The night sky had been alight with dry lightning, flashing through her blinds as she tried to fall asleep, and she was certain Puente Antigua would get some kind of flash summer rainfall. But the rain stayed fifty miles west, over the crash site.

" -- a lot more complicated process than you’d like to believe, Jane," Erik is saying, voice tight. "Not to mention illegal."

"SHIELD has all of my stuff, all of _your_ stuff, and now they’ve got Thor, too. You didn’t see his face, Erik -- he’s in trouble, and I can’t _lose_ him!"

"Lose him, or lose the evidence he represents?" Erik presses, meanly, and Darcy clears her throat.

"I brought hot coffee!" she offers brightly, "and enough sugar to make a five-year-olds’ slumber party an excellent backdrop for an M Night Shamalayan scene of carnage."

"Oh," says Jane, surprised, and crunches across the gravel to her. She’s wearing a shirt with the council of Jedi Knights on it, arranged to look like Christ’s Last Supper. The caption underneath reads, _May the Force Be With You._ "You didn’t have to do that -- I mean, there isn’t a lot of interning you can do right now, seeing as we have nothing --"

"Oh, please," Darcy cuts in over her fumbling. "You’re the Meryl Strep to my Anne Hathaway. I am well trained and here of my own free will. Although I think this makes you the Stanley Tucci of this trifecta," she frowns in Erik’s general direction.

Erik isn’t listening, though. He’s scowling down at a book they’ve got open on the patio table. His daemon treads water in her tub.

"So! What are we doing?" Darcy asks, stealing a coffee for herself.

"We’re speed-forging false identification so we can go into a top-secret government facility and break Thor out by pretending he’s my enraged ex-boyfriend because I feel guilty and a lot like it’s my fault he got captured even though he’s the one that asked me to take him," Jane answers all in a rush.

"... right," says Darcy. Dwornin licks his eyeball, unconcerned.

"You’ve _got_ to be kidding me!" bursts out Erik suddenly, and Jane goes to his side immediately.

Darcy starts to follow, when movement in her peripheral catches her attention. She looks.

On the corner of the lot, where the property line for the lab meets the neighbor’s residential lot, there’s a man leaning against the end of the privacy fence. She doesn’t recognize him, but then again, Puente Antigua’s been crawling with strange faces the last few days. He’s got oily black hair, slicked down against his neck, and he’s dressed in a long, expensive black coat over a vest and nice tie -- seriously, does nobody even pretend that New Mexico has any weather when they’re considering which parts of their wardrobe to bring? A silver fox daemon twines around his ankles, sniffing at the grass.

She meets his eyes. He straightens, like that’s exactly what he was waiting for, and with a nod in her direction, he turns around. Within the space of one blink to the next, he’s disappeared from sight.

"Darcy!" Jane’s voice cracks with excitement. "Come look at this!"

Shaking off her unease, Darcy obeys. Jane points excitedly at the book, open to a map of --

"Woah, this isn’t Science, what’s this?" Darcy goes, eyes flicking to the top of the page, which captions it as a constellation map of all the worlds of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life. "Yeah, I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce that."

"Look, though!"

Darcy follows her pointing finger, blinks, looks at Erik’s daemon and back at the map and then at Erik’s daemon again. The pattern of star-white spots on her back is almost identical to the pattern in the book. For a turtle, she looks flustered with the attention.

"I don’t suppose that’s coincidence," Dwornin comments.

Erik sighs and drags a hand down his face. "Do either of you got a picture of our illustrious guest?"

"Oh!" Darcy raises her hand. "Me! It’s on my Facebook!"

☄

**(interlude)**

Jane sits tucked into one corner of her bed, blanket thrown over her knees. The rest of the bed is cluttered with papers; all the print-outs she could convince the Puente Antigua Public Library to let her print. It’s hard to start over from scratch, Agent Coulson, she thinks bitterly, when you’ve left me absolutely nothing but the clothes on my back. She doesn’t even have a laptop anymore.

Somebody bangs on the door to the camper. She and Vitch both startle so badly that he winds up swinging from the light fixture. She untangles him and lets him wrap around her torso, piggy-backing him to the door.

Thor stands there, Erik slung unconscious over his shoulder.

Jane’s shriek of relief to him all right is smothered by a quieter exclamation of dismay at Erik's state, but, seeing the look on her face, Thor hastens to assure her that Erik’s fine, just passed-out drunk.

"Put him on the bed," she suggests, and then, remembering that her bed is covered in reams of paper, hurries to clear it out before Thor levers Erik onto her covers. He rouses enough to make a inebriated sound of discomfort; looking around, Jane spots the problem.

"Vitch, can you --"

He bounds down the steps, and through his eyes Jane sees a peculiar sight: Erik’s turtle daemon, far enough away from him to be a strain on both of them, painstakingly walks towards the camper, weaving and rocking and not altogether conscious herself. She’s accompanied by a creature no larger than a housecat.

Vitch picks up the turtle and carries her into the camper. Jane fills the largest bowl of water she has with water and he lowers the turtle into it: she sighs happily and drops off to sleep without pause.

The camper lists heavily to one side when Thor comes back inside: with him in it, available space seems to shrink to breathing room and nothing more. Jane presses her back against the sink and resents having to tilt her head back as far as she does to meet Thor’s gaze. But only a little bit.

Around the corners of his eyes, she can still see the vestiges of that wild, careening grief he howled to the raining sky when he found himself unable to lift his hammer from the stone. But the smile on his face has a tranquility to it, and when he looks at her, he _really_ looks at her, uncombed hair and smudges of red ink on her cheek and fluffy lemur daemon all. He inclines his head to her, and she doesn’t know what to do.

Vitch tugs at the hem of her shirt. "Look," he says, and she does.

The creature Thor carries in his arms is seemingly entirely made of interlocking armoured scales, from her snout all the way down her long, flat tail. But then she tucks her head around Thor’s forearm, regarding them solemnly, and Jane sees that her eyes are bright, black, and inquisitive, her velvety nose twitching at them with interest, and her underbelly is covered in soft fur.

Jane doesn’t need to be told what she is.

"A pangolin," she murmurs.

"Aye, that is what Erik Selvig said as well," Thor acknowledges.

She looks up at him, neck creaking in protest. "I thought you ... your kind didn’t have daemons."

"I believe she only appeared once I ..." A muscle ticks in his jaw. "Once I accepted that my exile was permanent. That I was truly mortal, and would be for all of my days. That I am Thor, K -- Prince of Asgard no longer, but just Thor, of Midgard."

Jane reaches out, reacting to the tone of his voice, the crack that appeared in it like the well of grief is right underneath, like a penny could be tossed in it and not reach bottom, but the pangolin gets there first, turning in Thor’s arms to press her snout against the underside of his chin, a sound not unlike a purr rumbling through her chest.

Thor’s face softens. "Jane," he says, and her heartbeat jolts in surprise, because that’s the first time he’s said her name like he’s addressing an equal. "It is the most peculiar feeling. I understand myself to be whole, here," and he presses his free hand flat to his chest. "With my soul intact, same as I ever was, and yet, she’s also here," the hand moves, curling around his daemon’s armoured back. "We are one and the same."

The look on his face is so astonished, so private, that Jane politely averts her eyes. This only goes to bring to her attention that her camper is in its usual state, and not someplace she wants to entertain an alien-turned-human.

She looks back quickly. "Yes," she says gently, smiling. "That’s what it’s like."

He absorbs this, absently running his fingers along the chinks of the pangolin’s armor. "I have much to learn," he admits after a beat. "And, for once in my life, no idea who I am or where to go from here."

"Tell you what," says Jane. "Let’s go up on the roof. You can tell me how you came to be here, and Vitch and I can give you Human 101."

☄

Darcy arrives even earlier the next morning, because it turns out that when you don’t have any way to access the Internet in your apartment and the TV only has five channels, you run out of things to do pretty quickly. Darcy is a product of her generation and has completely lost the ability to entertain herself. She brought a few novels with her when she moved down here, but she’d already read those, so she wound up eating the last of her Pillsbury cookie dough and talking with Dwornin until she fell asleep at a time her sixteen-year-old self would be ashamed to admit.

She finds Erik at the kitchen table with a towel draped over his head -- "it’s too bright," he complains with the whine familiar to everybody who’s ever been hungover -- and a glass of water in front of him.

He tells her to go check the roof, so she leaves him there.

"I thought he was supposed to be breaking into the SHIELD compound in the desert and rescuing Thor," Dwornin says wryly. "How do you get drunk from that?"

"I’m just glad they didn’t ship him off to Guantanamo," Darcy responds. "Try explaining that to the academic records department at UNM."

She finds Jane and Thor up on the roof, where the map of Yggdrasil is scratched into the cement. In its cauldron, the fire’s long since burned down to ash and soot, and someone’s taken the care to drape a blanket over Jane. They’re both asleep. Thor doesn’t look like he’s been tortured, and Darcy relaxes fractionally.

In between the lawn chairs, curled close enough that it takes Darcy a moment to register them as two separate shapes, Vitch and a pangolin have their noses tucked into the ruffs of fur at the other’s neck. Their chests rise and fall.

Disarmed, Darcy pivots on her heel and goes right back downstairs.

☄

It’s probably the most surreal, domestic morning of Darcy’s life, and that’s including that time she woke up to find her roommate freshman year asleep on the floor with a goat under her arm, her grasshopper daemon trapped under a sombrero on the other side of the sofa.

Darcy fetches eggs (the fridge is still unplugged) and Jane shows Thor how to cook them.

He serves them breakfast, his pangolin daemon waddling back and forth, helpfully fetching utensils and napkins for them. Darcy can’t quite keep from smirking the entire time, because this smacks entirely too much of an SNL skit about male models being perfect househusbands, and Dwornin eyes her judgementally from his sunny perch atop the empty whiteboard frame.

Thor tells them much of what he told Jane last night: about Asgard, about how Asgardians keep their souls on the inside (which still unsettles Darcy to think about; Thor talks about it like it’s completely natural, so it must not cause them discomfort, but all she’s envisioning is Dwornin, entombed inside her own red muscle and bones,) about Odin and Mjolnir, about Jotunheim and his brother.

"He is king now," Thor turns that thought over, considering. His expression, jovial thusfar, tightens with grief. "Now that our father is passed from us. He’ll be a good king," he decides, more with faith than with certainty. "Although if I was too young and arrogant to be a proper king, then surely he --" he cuts himself off, still staring off at some midpoint, and shakes himself. "Then again, perhaps I did not know my brother so well as I pretended."

Nobody says anything for a long beat. The pangolin stands on her back legs and rests her chin on his thigh. They have an exchange that’s just between them.

Then Thor slaps the table, making them all jump again. "I am sorry, my friends, I do not mean to be gloomy. Here, allow me --"

He collects the dishes; Jane stands and shows him how the coffee pot works, cheerily saying everyone could use a cup.

She leaves him to his thoughts, returning to enthusiastically connect their gaps in knowledge between the Asgardian Bifrost and their science. 

Vitch sits with the pangolin, close enough that his thighs bump against her scales occasionally. Darcy catches Erik studying them over the rim of his mug, eyes narrowed, and visibly _sees_ him decide he isn’t going to think about it.

Then, because she’s least expecting it, four giant Asgardians start banging on the glass.

☄

Everything gets really awkward from that moment on.

Jane gets dragged into the conversation to be the official mortal-to-Asgardian translator, so Erik and Darcy stand off to the side and try not to attract attention to themselves. The warriors all take note of the presence of the pangolin and the other daemons, and then seemingly dismiss them while, voices overlapping, they explain what’s been going on in their realm in Thor’s absence.

"Man, and I thought this summer was just going to be complex math and getting Jane to shower regularly," Darcy comments to Dwornin in an undertone.

He snorts, turning his head and eyeing Hogun speculatively, as he’s nearest.

"-- will open the Bifrost for us," Xena -- sorry, Lady Sif -- is saying urgently. "You must return and confront Loki -- you are the only one of us he ever feared!"

Volstagg, distracted by the coffee pot, bows and entreats Jane as to whether he may try a cup, the smell is _glorious,_ and he uses so many honorifics that, flustered, Jane almost drops a mug twice before she gets the coffee poured into it.

"I wish I had popcorn."

" _Darcy,"_ Erik admonishes out of the side of his mouth.

Fandral, however, has discovered the pangolin. He kneels down next to her. "Hello, pretty thing," he says in what Darcy’s sure he thinks is a charming manner, but she’s just getting more creepy Renaissance Faire vibes. He reaches out with one hand, like he’s going to pet her soft-looking muzzle.

Instantly, Thor’s hand closes around his wrist. He looks more surprised by how quickly he moved than anyone.

"I do not think that is prudent, my friend," he goes. "It would be a violation for you to touch her."

Lady Sif, quicker on the uptake, looks from the pangolin to Vitch to the other two and back again, and looks astonished. "By the Eye of Odin," she curses. "You've gone native!"

And then everything gets even _more_ awkward.

So when an enormous monster made out of celestial steel comes stomping through the town like a particularly angry Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, it’s almost a relief.

It obviously rankles Thor on a deep level not to be able to throw himself into the charge with the other warriors, but he turns his attention to evacuating every establishment on Main Street, clearing innocent civilians from the damage path. Darcy does the same, helping the waitress from the diner carry the terrarium with her salamander daemon in it until a neighbor with a truck takes over. Dwornin clings to her collar, breathing harshly through his open mouth, frill extended and tail wrapped tight around her neck. She’s so used to seeing him acting unconcerned that this level of agitation is alarming. She rubs his nose.

When she makes it back -- because she is totally going to die for six college credits, well done, her -- it’s in time to hear Thor mutter in an undertone to Jane, "This is my brother’s doing. He seeks to prevent me from returning."

Jane’s expression is roughly equivalent to _no shit,_ but she refrains from saying anything.

Hogun sprints towards the Destroyer, Volstagg converging on the other side. Able to only fire its Laser Beam of Death in one direction, the thing aims for Volstagg first, coming so close Darcy thinks that’s it -- except he flings himself to the side, crunching against the hood of a car.

The beam swings towards Hogun, who dodges nimbly. The general store behind him explodes. Everybody hits the ground, covering their heads as glass and debris rain down on them. A bag of Skittles lands at Darcy’s feet.

She bends to pick it up. "Sweet, taste the rainbow," she says, and tears it open.

(Never let it be said that Darcy doesn’t have her priorities in line.)

" _Volstagg!"_ Thor bellows.

Volstagg’s upright, one hand braced for balance against the sideview mirror of the Pontiac he crashed into, the other clawing at his breastplate like something’s burning him underneath. He doubles over, gagging.

Thor jerks, like he’s going to run for him, but the Destroyer swings around, searching, and he remains where he’s hidden, crouched behind the corner mailbox, whole body tense and trembling. His daemon whines.

An exclamation makes them all look, the warriors included: Volstagg’s regained his feet, and in front of him, rapidly flitting from shape to shape with naked fright, fat boa constrictor to oriole to otter, is --

"Don’t let it graze you!" Volstagg hollers.

"Oh, _really?"_ Lady Sif returns acidly, attracting the Destroyer’s attention, and rolls to the side, too late. The beam singes off four inches of her long ponytail and she gasps, crumpling out of sight with both hands clasped over her chest.

"I thought the Destroyer ... you know, _destroys_ shit," Darcy goes tremulously.

"There are many ways to destroy a man, Darcy," Thor returns, voice grim at the sight of what’s happening to his friends. "Why do you think being stripped down to mortality was the worst punishment my father could think to bestow on me?"

Lady Sif recovers quickly, straightening up and taking her staff in hand. Her daemon falls in beside her, flicking from wolf to big cat and then tentatively holding that form, all spots and claws.

She charges. The Destroyer ducks as she pole-vaults over it, aiming again for the knot at the back of its neck, an attack that goes wide when it neatly strikes the daemon clean across the chest, sending her flying.

She hits the ground, rolls, and comes again to her feet.

"How _dare_ you!" she screams, her face ashen and her limbs visibly shaking. "How _dare_ you touch her! Loki, heed me, when I get my hands on you, I will tear your soul asunder from your body and disembowel it and _feed you its entrails_ and see how you like it, you --"

She continues on in that vein, but things start exploding again, so Darcy doesn’t hear most of it.

"Remember that one," she says in an undertone to Dwornin, sharing a Skittle with him. "I want to use it in my next break-up speech."

Thor, at that point, decides he’s had enough, and employs the Noble Self-Sacrifice Play that has been the crux of so many video game storylines that Darcy’s able to spot what’s coming long before Jane or the warriors do. He strides out into the middle of the chaos, his daemon waddling ceremoniously beside him, and the Destroyer pauses, approaches him, and for the first time, acts like something being remote-controlled by a _person._ It hears him out -- Darcy, because she doesn’t possess super hearing, and neither does Dwornin, can’t hear a word of what she hopes is some serious badass monologue.

It kills him anyway.

☄

"What happened to her?" Jane asks.

"She lives still," Thor assures her; he’s emanating about three hundred more Cool Guy vibes now that he’s in full armor with his Sword-and-the-Stone Plot Point hammer, whatever its name is, held loosely at the ready. Jane, who probably had coke-bottle glasses and braces in high school and thus never had any experience talking to Cool Guys, is completely flustered. "She is in here, same as she always was," and Thor touches his hand to his chest. "I don’t have to look far to find her. I never did."

"I never even asked her name," Jane murmurs.

Thor smiles. "We decided on Frija," he says kindly, and she looks surprised; it’s not uncommon for acquaintances to know each other for ages without ever knowing the name of the other’s daemon. Darcy, for instance, doesn’t know Erik’s turtle’s name. "After my mother. There are many translations of her name from Allspeech to your tongues, but we liked that one best. It seemed fitting to honor her like that, as she was the only one who had no say in my banishment.

"Besides," he adds, and flips the hammer over. There, inscribed in the surface, is a symbol of many triangular interlocking plates, pulled together into a spiral. If you tilt your head, it looks a lot like a stylised pangolin. "She is never far."

☄

The battle isn’t over, of course.

Because it’s not a godly exit unless it’s suitably dramatic, Thor hauls Jane in by the waist, careful to keep his hands a respectful distance from Vitch, who is piggybacking like an especially fluffy backpack, and flies off with her.

It leaves the rest of them to follow on foot, so Erik, Darcy, the Asgardians, and their daemons all pile into the Camper Trailer of Science -- which Darcy thinks she’ll start calling the Mystery Machine -- and head to the Bifrost site, trying to look as cool as possible while doing so, like, no big deal, just taking the van. The site's not hard to find; darkly ominous clouds gather and writhe over the spot, and Thor left a pretty distinct jetstream to follow.

Erik drives, Darcy sits in the passenger seat, craned around so she can study the immortals they’re transporting in the back.

They’re all uncomfortably silent, completely out of their element and trying not to draw attention to the daemons sharing space with them. Unlike Frija, they hadn’t been reabsorbed when Thor regained his powers.

Because she’s actually a horrible person at heart, Darcy is seriously considering turning the radio on to easy listening.

Fandral, the only one who hadn’t come close enough to the Destroyer to get his soul ripped from him, presses into the smallest space he can inhabit in the corner, half-hidden by his fur ruff.

"Can’t you ask them to pick something smaller?" he demands of Volstagg and Hogun. "Either of them?"

"I’m afraid not, my friend," Volstagg returns without rancor. Darcy has absolutely no idea how the camper’s shocks are even _handling_ the weight of a female rhinoceros, but it is, and she blinks her largely-blind eyes at Volstagg’s remark, unperturbed. He slaps a hand against her side, looking delighted at the size and strength of her.

Fandral looks imploringly at Hogun.

"... no," Hogun grunts. 

They hit a bump; the Asgardians lurch, but nobody loses their balance despite not being buckled in because, _right,_ gods, but Hogun’s reindeer daemon tips unsteadily on her hooves, accidentally knocking Jane’s cabinets of Science with her antlers and denting them.

"Is this not what happens at adulthood?" Lady Sif says. "When a person decides on who they shall be at the end of their childhood, the soul settles into a permanent shape. How they choose, I have not the --"

"You know," Darcy calls back to her, conversational. "You and Loki have the same daemon."

Erik jerks the wheel. The Asgardians swivel around to stare at her. 

Darcy feels the intense urge to crawl into a hole and not come out; that’s incredibly intimidating.

" _Excuse_ me?" Lady Sif goes, dangerously. On her lap, the fox’s lips pull back from her teeth in a snarl. Darcy has sudden visions of Darcy-shiskebabs.

Erik steals incredulous glances sidelong. "How do you know what Loki’s daemon is? When did you meet _Loki?"_

"He dropped by to visit, remember?" Darcy widens her eyes at him pointedly, and when he continues to look blank, elaborates, "That day you and Jane were plotting to heroically rescue Thor from captivity, he was being all creepypasta Slender Man across the street. I only figured out it was him because of some of the more choice poems in that mythology book of yours described his appearance, and also Thor talked about him visiting him at the crater site. I mean, it’s doubtful she was his _actual_ daemon," she goes, trying to be reassuring. "She was probably just part of his disguise, but still." She nods at the fox. "It’s a little eerie, really."

"Loki and I have a lot in common," Lady Sif says stiffly. "Both of us excelled at arts denied to us by gender, and both of us were openly mocked for it."

The fox flattens her ears.

"... we were close," she admits, finally, in a strangely defeated tone.

"Your taste in suitors has always been questionable," Fandral remarks lightly.

She fires up immediately. "My taste in suitors is none of your business!"

"Oh, god," Erik mutters worriedly. "I don’t know what to do, the Norse gods are fighting in the backseat, oh god, please tell me this isn’t my life."

"Are you kidding? This is awesome, I’m so glad I took an uncharacteristic interest in thermonuclear astrophysics," Darcy says gleefully. "Imagine if I was back at Blockbuster right now, dude, for real."

Erik rolls his eyes. She turns back around to face the others. "Warm-bloodedness in a daemon," she starts, raising her voice to cut over the din of Lady Sif’s tart reprimands and Fandral’s loud protestations. "Is a sign of the habitual tendency towards caring for other people more than yourself. Generally. Foxes --" she points at Lady Sif, and the silver-brush tail of her daemon fluffs out. "Are cunning. Deceitful is one word, clever is another. They prefer to lay intricate traps for their prey and reap the benefits rather than expend more effort hunting. They live in pairs," and Lady Sif’s features flush, but only just. Darcy turns to Volstagg, whose daemon is so large it leaves the rest of them cramped for space, even in the trailer SHIELD so helpfully stripped of Science. "Rhinos are powerful and nearly unstoppable when in full charge. But, unless provoked, they’re peaceful herbivores who are extremely protective of their family units. You, sir," she points last at Hogun and the reindeer daemon. "You dress like a hunter. And yet your daemon is that of prey. What does that say about you?"

Hogun almost has an expression at that. At least, Darcy’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

A long pause greets her speech. 

They’re off-roading it now, the camper banging and swaying over hard desert ground. In Darcy’s lap, Dwornin licks his eyeball.

"Your people are brave beyond measure," Sif says finally, a solemn declaration. "To wear yourselves so openly like this."

☄

They never do learn the outcome of Thor’s battle with his brother, who won or who lost, or the fate of the warriors’ daemons, because the Bifrost breaks apart and the atmospheric readings in the area remain maddeningly stable.

Agent Coulson orders an Agent Barton and a handful of bodyguards with a fondness for gas station popcorn to stay behind, in case the fight on Asgard didn’t go as planned and something unpleasant comes back to Earth looking for vengeance. The lab came away from the Destroyer largely intact, with only a few shattered windows that are easily replaced; the SHIELD agents help install them, and then step back as Jane burns a track across the floor, doing Science.

If she and Vitch were obsessed before, it’s _nothing_ to how they are now. 

Aliens are real. A wormhole to Earth can open, and it’s up to them to open that door from the other side.

Darcy finds herself pulling a lot of long nights and early mornings. Erik stops living out of his suitcase and rents a spare room out of a neighbor’s basement, because almost every apartment complex in town was levelled and there aren’t any vacancies in the ones that weren’t. He’s at a loss about what to do with his daemon, though; they can’t keep her in a Tupperware tub of water forever.

"You guys can totally take apart a lab in, like, an hour," Darcy remarks casually to Clint over a quickly slapped-together lunch of salami on rye bread, smeared with peanut butter. "I don’t suppose you can construct a freshwater pond out of the New Mexico desert?"

Clint scratches his chin. "Was never allowed to play with Legos much as a kid," he says. "Not a building type, myself. But I can assemble a bow pretty damn fast, maybe I can put something together for the Doc."

Which is how Erik finds himself with a terrarium full of wading water and spaghnum moss, buckled into a harness that Erik can strap on like a mountaineer’s backpack, so he can race back and forth across the lab, fetching equations and textbooks for Jane and bringing her ideas, and doesn’t have to worry about stretching to the full reach of his daemon’s distance.

Everybody acts a lot more friendly towards Clint after that. Well, at least, Jane seems to have forgiven him for being SHIELD affiliated and SHIELD for taking all her stuff, because she’s a surprisingly nice person like that, but Erik and Darcy were slower to warm.

"We still haven’t gotten our iPod back," she calls up, standing on the patio with her hands on her hips.

Crouched on the rooftop, Clint spares her an amused look. "Is that the royal we?"

"Dwornin and I," Darcy corrects. "I _paid_ for those songs I downloaded, you know --"

"Why would you do that?" he sounds baffled.

"-- because I support independent artists and I want them to keep producing music," Darcy continues without pause. "But I can’t appreciate them because some _thugs_ took my iPod before I could give them a listen and won’t give it back!"

"Maybe I stole it," he deadpans. "Maybe I was so impressed by your music taste that I had to keep it."

"Approbation of my personal belongings in an unlawful seizure?" Darcy returns, dry. "Hmmm, pretty sure I could sue for that."

"Sounds like an accurate representation of my life," Clint says gamely. "Almost vaporized by aliens one day, sued over Ciara the next."

"Ha! You _did_ go through my iPod! I knew it!"

Like his extremely subtle Kevlar suit that in no way screams _I am a trained government assassin_ at ten paces, Clint’s daemon is all black, and when he’s in motion, she’s almost impossible to spot, camouflaged underneath his crossbow or on his utility belt.

"I wouldn’t do that if I were you," Darcy says mildly one day, looking up from her task of alphabetising Jane’s latest notes and staring pointedly at where Clint’s daemon is approaching the lazily sunning Dwornin, pincers at the ready.

Clint drops the act. "Why not?"

"Because he’ll eat her for breakfast." 

And, faster than the human eye can follow, Dwornin spins around with a frightening hiss, his rows of needle-sharp teeth snapping shut so close to the scorpion’s vulnerable eyes that Darcy feels the proximity.

"Point taken," Clint says mildly. 

Dwornin and the scorpion regard each other for one long moment, his spiky frill extended and the scorpion’s tail poised over her back, before she turns and retreats. Dwornin settles back into tranquil repose, face turned up to the sunlight.

"Papa always told me never to trust a man with a predator daemon," Darcy drawls.

This earns her a wry look. "No, he didn’t."

"No, he didn’t." Darcy’s father is a dental hygienist who likes penny loafers and Monday night football and doesn’t have much of a personality otherwise to give any kind of advice to Darcy frequently enough for her to take it to heart.

"Her name’s Marguerite," Clint offers suddenly, and Darcy smiles down at the papers in her hand.

She’s out and about the next day, grocery list in hand, pockmarked with craters of coffee rings, when an old man approaches her and asks her for change. He’s trying to get to Los Angeles, see, they’ve got a program for people like him, but he doesn’t have enough for the MegaBus.

"Yeah, sure," Darcy says immediately, fishing her wallet out of her back pocket. "Do you want someone to come to the station with you?"

"No," the man goes, staring vacantly at some point over her shoulder. Then, apparently with great effort, he adds, "But thank you."

"No problem." She passes him a $5 and he nods, shuffling off.

She isn’t surprised when Clint materializes at the next crosswalk.

"That was awful friendly of you," he comments, sounding surprised.

In a town with only three working stoplights, there isn’t much point in having walk signals, so Darcy steps out as soon as there’s a break in mid-morning traffic, Dwornin scuttling in her wake. 

"Well, I’ve learned, haven’t I?" she goes. "About how to treat the daemonless? Oh, come on," she cajoles, when he gets that polite look of discomfort most people get when they talk about those who’ve lost their daemon, like they’re better off not thinking about it. "Haven’t you ever listened to Joan Osborne? What if that was Jesus, dude, just trying to get to LA? What if he’s another Thor, an alien with his soul inside of him? You never know."

☄

Six months after the Puente Antigua incident, when Darcy’s back in Albuquerque and two weeks away from the final exams of the most interminable semester of her _life,_ Agent Coulson subpoenas her for debriefing. At least, that’s the reason for the official summons; Darcy’s already given her statement and signed about twenty different forms saying she won’t talk about what happened in the desert, because Darcy’s life is _actually Area 51,_ so it can’t be that.

When they escort her into the interrogation room, Coulson’s already there, reclined in his chair and flipping through a North Face catalog. His daemon lays sprawled at his feet, stately and grey and somehow appearing even larger lying down than she does standing up.

Her nose twitches, but otherwise neither of them react to Darcy’s presence.

She settles into her chair, folding her hands and twiddling her thumbs. "You a big shopper?" she nods at the catalog.

"The little descriptions they add to their products are the small joys of my life," Coulson deadpans, folding the catalog and tucking it away before zeroing his attention in on her. "Your major is political science," he says, apropos of nothing. "Public relations?"

"No," Darcy answers truthfully. Then, "Well, not on purpose. Mostly I just wanted to grow up to be one of those middle-aged men with the serious-business beards who get paid to appear on talk shows and pretend to be experts on the Current Issue of the day. I have wanted to solemnly condemn the acts of government since I was five years old. This is documented. So that’s my concentration. Diplomacy I can do."

"Dr. Selvig mentioned in his statement that you gave precise profiles of the Asgardians and their daemons." He doesn’t blink. "Also, I don’t intimidate you."

"Of course not," Darcy answers, startled into smiling.

Anteaters are, after all, the only mammals that are completely toothless.

☄

Pepper Potts is, without a doubt, the coolest woman Darcy has ever met, and this is keeping in mind that a few years ago, Darcy shared a van with an Asgardian lady warrior in the middle of defending her right to a relationship.

If it wasn’t for the fact every fiber of her PoliSci major body shrivels up in horror at the thought, Darcy would _totally_ write in Pepper for president on every ballot for the rest of her natural life.

There must be a million and one things Pepper needs to be doing, but she pauses, pushes a stray lock of hair behind her ear, and turns her whole attention to Darcy, who’s standing awkwardly in foyer of Stark Tower, in a new pair of heels and with her hair wrestled into some fabulous beach waves, if she does say so herself.

"Hello!" she choruses. "You must be the new agent Phil brought."

"Yeah," Darcy goes, and Dwornin bites the inside of her wrist. "I mean, yes. He dropped me off on his way to Montana."

Pepper’s mouth pulls to the side. "New York is on the way for a Albuquerque-to-Billings flight?"

"Apparently." They share the driest of looks.

Then Pepper says briskly, "Walk with me!", turning on her heel and striding for the elevator. She’s wearing a deep auburn dress that brings out the highlights of brown in her hair, sleeveless and with a loose turtleneck that gives the appearance of a scarf draped around her.

More importantly, it gives a foothold for her flying fox daemon, who hangs upside down from her collar, holding himself against her spine with the hooks of his leathery black wings. His russet red fur compliments the ensemble completely.

"You," says Pepper, as the elevator starts upward. "Have a good read for people, according to Phil’s report. We’ve decided to task you to Operation Keep Tony Stark from Doing Shit That Causes the International Community to Freak Out Because It Costs Us Too Much Paperwork. It’s a multi-personnel, full-time operation."

Darcy can hear the capital letters in her voice, and considering Darcy has a tendency to give everything capital letters, too, she decides right here and now that this is the _best job ever._

"I bet."

Pepper grins, and then her daemon clambers over until he’s hanging off her shoulder, one wing wrapped around her waist like an impressive-looking tattoo. His muzzle twitches eagerly, and Pepper darts a curious look at Darcy. "Do you have a fruit cup in your purse?"

"I --" Darcy goes, bewildered. "I, yes. It’s just the honeydew left, though, because I don’t like it and there weren’t any trash cans outside the building for me to toss it."

"Yeah, we don’t keep them too close to the doors, we’ve had trouble with explosives being left in them before," she says absently, and then, as her daemon licks his lips, she asks, "Would you mind terribly if we had it? We’re rather fond of honeydew."

"Of course." Darcy fishes the remainder of the fruit cup out of her purse, passing it over.

The flying fox is ecstatic. Pepper holds the container up for him and he immediately pushes two pieces of melon into his mouth and starts chewing, his cheeks bulging and his eyes squinted up delightedly in Darcy’s direction.

Pepper’s phone goes off just as the elevator doors open again. Judging from the decor, the just-unloaded-from-the-van new furniture smell, and the sudden silence of fax machines and office chatter, they’re in the residential portion of Stark Tower. She can feel Dwornin’s tiny heart racing. "I have to get this," Pepper says, distracted, and passes something in a folder off to Darcy. "Take that to Tony, please," she points helpfully down a hallway. "Tell him if he doesn’t sign it I’ll tell Dummy to start making all of his milkshakes with skim milk."

"Okay," Darcy says dazedly, and Pepper’s smile softens, knowing.

While behind her, the CEO of Stark Industries talks rapidly into her phone with language that might as well be Greek for all Darcy understands it (she never took any business classes,) she drifts down the hallway. The carpeting’s thick under her heels, and the walls are painted a bold olive green, but there’s no artwork hung from them yet.

It’s not difficult to find where Tony is: the hallway leads to a door, and beyond it is a workshop, already cluttered with projects suspended on hooks. Faintly, she hears Black Sabbath playing.

She knocks.

"For the last time, Pep, I --" a voice calls out, clearly audible, and even though she sees no movement, he suddenly cuts himself off. "You’re not Pepper. Who are you? Jarvis, who's that -- oh, fine, they’re not integrated into the SHIELD database yet, what’s the point of having the most sophisticated -- you know what? Never mind. Who are you?" he demands again.

"Um," says Darcy brilliantly. Dwornin hisses like he’s going to bite her again. "If I tell you I’m one of Agent Coulson’s new lackeys, will you promise not to give me that deeply disappointed look that tells me I let Iron Man down and now I’ll have to revoke my American citizenship, move to Canada, and eat snow?"

There’s a pause, and then the voice comes from the seemingly abandoned workshop, a lot less hostile. 

"Who are you?"

"Darcy Lewis," she says. And, "I tased Thor the first time he landed on Earth."

The lock clicks open immediately.

"You," says a voice from directly beside her, the second she steps inside. "Are a national treasure, Miss Lewis."

Tony Stark is shorter than her.

This is the first thing Darcy notices: sure, she’s wearing some impressive heels, but Tony Stark -- _Iron Man Tony Stark oh my god_ \-- is _shorter_ than she is. His eyes are awake, brightly inquisitive and looking at her with good humor, and he’s wearing a Styx shirt that looks like it hasn’t been washed since Mr. Roboto topped the charts.

"Do you know how annoying it is to bang out dents on the Iron Man helmet without damaging the internal display? I got enough problems keeping my suits in the air without some frat boy with no sense of humor adding to them. Thank you for the mental image."

"You’re welcome," Darcy says primly, and extends the folder toward him. "Miss Potts wants you to sign this, by the way."

He takes it from her without comment, fishing a pen out of his back pocket and flipping the folder open, signing without looking. His eyes flick appraisingly down the front of her shirt, but loses interest half-way through the action when he remembers that no boobs except Pepper’s hold any appeal for him anymore. 

"So. What have you heard about me?" he wants to know.

Darcy can recognize the sound of someone fishing for a compliment when she hears it.

"Only what I’ve read on 4chan," she says brightly.

"Good," says Tony firmly. "You’ll probably find more truth about me there than on any legitimate news site."

"Even that bit with the tentacles?"

"Darcy Lewis, the first thing you need to understand about me is that anything you read involving me and tentacles is _absolutely_ true," he informs her solemnly, and hands the folder back. "That will be all."

"Of course," Darcy replies, grinning, and leaves.

When she thinks she’s a safe enough distance away from the workshop, she turns her head so that her lips brush against Dwornin’s bony dorsal ridge. "Could you see his daemon?" she murmurs.

"No."

Darcy nods. That, at least, is one thing unanimous across the board: no one has laid eyes on Tony Stark’s daemon since he came back from Afghanistan.

☄

It says something about how starstruck Darcy’s life is on a daily basis that it takes her a whole ten minutes of being in the Black Widow’s presence before she notices that the cerulean-blue bangle around her wrist isn’t a bracelet, but rather a snake, coiled around on himself.

Natasha, of course, catches the look on her face. "What?" she goes, amused. "Were you expecting a spider, maybe?"

"I --" Darcy prevaricates.

"Yes!" Tony Stark shouts from the next room. "One of those massive ones that like to eat their mates after nookie!"

Natasha rolls her eyes.

"You weren’t complaining when we used Naoyta’s venom to abate the symptoms of your palladium poisoning," she calls back, purposefully mild.

"Oh, yes, boomslang venom and lithium dioxide, exactly what a man wants coursing around in his blood."

Darcy feels her eyebrows fly up. She glances sharply at Dwornin to make sure he heard the same thing, but Dwornin, as always, looks unimpressed by this tidbit. Maybe so: boomslangs are the most agile of the arboreal snakes, and also the most venomous.

"Your blood is basically the Hudson, Stark," Natasha is saying. "I don’t want to know what you’ve got floating around in it."

"I resent that!"

☄

She isn’t, naturally, supposed to be there, which is the only reason why she sees what she does.

She wobbles down the back staircase that leads to Tony’s lab in heels that she’s been in since an early wake-up call that morning, and they’re hurting her feet, and she needs to tell Tony about the new Avengers policy that Bruce and Jane helped instate for Science reasons, because that’s her _job,_ when some instinct stops her descent.

She crouches down on the last step, wrapping her arms around her knees and letting Dwornin scuttle down to perch atop her wrists. She rubs his scaly head with her chin.

Oblivious to her, Tony’s got one hand up the front of his shirt, face spasming with discomfort as he fiddles. After a beat, he pulls the arc reactor out with a soft hiss of released compression that’s audible even to Darcy, still outside the door. He turns it over in his hands, and she clearly sees the triangle of metal that is the replacement palladium. Without fuss, he pulls that chip out -- the reactor winks out, going dark in a way that makes the professional in Darcy whose job it is to keep the Avengers alive quietly freak out -- and opens a compartment underneath it.

He tips it, and something very, very tiny falls into the palm of his hand.

Darcy’s first thought is, inanely, of her brother’s comment about how, if their daemons were small enough, men would safeguard them by sealing them in pill capsules and hiding them inside their bodies.

Tony’s daemon is wrapped in long strings of plasma discharge like she’s still in chrysalis, a breathlessly delicate sight.

Gently, he wipes her clean, and she stands on the flat of his palm on spindly legs. She must say something, because Tony tilts his head back, barking laughter, and her wings unfurl, fluttering at the air to dry them, the same brilliant blue color the arc reactor gets when it’s at full shine. She didn’t have that shape before he spent three months in captivity: all of Darcy’s SHIELD training tells her there are only a few things that will cause a full-grown man’s daemon to change shape.

"Let’s go," Dwornin tells her in a firm whisper.

Darcy nods, not needing to be told twice. Even though she’s pretty sure Tony and the phoenix butterfly are too absorbed in each other to notice, for the brief amount of time they have together before Tony needs to put the arc reactor back, she slips her heels off and tiptoes back up the stairs. Jarvis doesn’t betray her.

Absently stroking Dwornin’s spine with her fingertip, Darcy marvels briefly at the fact that Tony makes a habit of surrounding himself with people whose daemons are predators to his own.

There’s Darcy and Dwornin, Jane and Vitch. Natasha and Naoyta, Clint and Marguerite, Thor and Frija, whenever he summons her out of the hammer. Coulson’s giant anteater daemon, Steve’s meerkat, who stands at attention like a soldier whenever she sees Darcy coming and never relaxes when out in public, always choosing the highest vantage point and keeping keen eyes open in every direction, like she feels she needs to compensate for not being big enough to help Steve in combat. Even the Lieutenant Colonel’s coyote daemon, to some extent. The people Tony keeps closest to heart (so to speak, because Tony keeps a little blue butterfly where his heart should be) and their daemons are all insectivores.

Except for Pepper, she realizes with a jolt that has her laughing out loud. Except for Pepper, because flying foxes are the only bats whose diets are comprised entirely of _fruit._

Feeling light on her feet, Darcy runs up the rest of the stairs.

 

\- fin

**Author's Note:**

> Helpful Google image reference, for the more obscure daemons!
> 
>  
> 
> [Dwornin, a bearded dragon](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcs6qtbxc01rjy4k4o4_500.jpg)  
> [Vitch, an Indri lemur](http://mongabay.s3.amazonaws.com/madagascar/600/madagascar_0612.jpg)  
> [Frija, a pangolin](http://www.heraldgoa.in/newsimages/Pangolin.gif)  
> [Erik Selvig's spotted turtle](http://www.dec.ny.gov/images/remediation_hudson_images/hrewpwidstu.JPG)  
> [Coulson's giant anteater](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcp13dceMc1qc0n35o1_r1_500.jpg)  
> [Sif and Loki's gray fox](http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a86/Pritchard71/Daily%20Kos/island-gray-fox-wcs-endangered-spec.jpg)  
> [Marguerite, an emperor scorpion](http://www.reptileexpert.org/images/emperor-scorpion-handling.jpg)  
> [Pepper's flying fox](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvjhqyKsRL1qgfgmzo1_500.jpg)  
> [Naoyta, a boomslang](http://www.reptileknowledge.com/images/boomslang.jpg)  
> [Tony's swallowtail butterfly](http://www.smashinglists.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Silvery-Blue-Butterfly.jpg)


End file.
